Subscribe to Archivestuff Have your say The Government has decided to tread carefully with Fiji's military regime after the expulsion of New Zealand High Commissioner Michael Green. Prime Minister Helen Clark said yesterday the Government would widen travel sanctions, but it ruled out freezing the New Zealand assets of regime members and their associates. An announcement of the new measures would be delayed until after Monday's Cabinet meeting, she said.
"Then we can make sure we have got all the ends tied with both immigration and here (in Wellington) and also in Suva," Clark said after a meeting of a special Cabinet policy committee. The committee considered sanctions drawn up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade after a review of New Zealand's relationship with Fiji and in light of the expulsion of Green this month. Clark said the new measures involved "a tightening of the immigration regime; in essence, rolling it out to others who are complicit in what is going on there".
Asked about financial assets, she said: "It is obviously something that would come to mind but is not being actively pursued at the moment." Clark said that while many regime members, including interim Prime Minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama, had family members in New Zealand, many of them were residents or citizens. "So that is not easy to deal with," she said.
"There are very specific grounds around which you can roll back that kind of status." Officials privy to the decision on further sanctions taken yesterday described them as "tweaking" existing measures. They said the key message the Government was trying to get across was that it objected to Green's expulsion, but the primary objective remained getting Fiji's interim government to commit to elections.
After December's coup, New Zealand banned officials closely associated with the military takeover and their families from visiting. Clark has said sanctions will remain in place until New Zealand sees concrete steps towards democracy.
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